This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Grim faced and with an unsteady gait, Chris Mazza stayed one funereal step behind his mother, Carole, as he at long last made his way toward what we will call the ORNGE witness chair.

A psychologist would sink into a deep reverie on sociopathology while listening to the mercurial testimony of the ousted CEO, from an emotional quaking to, at times, a near commanding performance.

Early students of political science would, in turn, wonder: all these months later and this is what we get?

Make no mistake, as theatre there was lots to chew on, not least the last- minute attempt by Progressive Conservative MPP Frank Klees to generate a headline as startling as his tan. Grilling Mazza on cheques cut to former ORNGE executive Jacob Blum, sums that, we are told, went toward the purchase of cocaine, Mazza asserted that if for one second he knew the money was being used for street drugs he would have been “livid.” As to Blum’s general mental state, Mazza blurted awkwardly, “I didn’t want him to suicide.”

Mental health has been the undercurrent tugging at Mazza’s own delayed appearance. “I just got out of hospital a short while ago,” he told the committee.

Article Continued Below

The death of Joshua played early in Mazza’s testimony: he felt enormous guilt over his son’s death, he said; he poured all his energy into ORNGE to assuage that guilt by saving the lives of others (Josh passed away some months after the launch of the air ambulance service); the dismantling of the air and land ambulance company had triggered “deep-seated emotions related to my son’s death.”

All of this is tragedy.

It isn’t, however, the story at hand. That story is a story of a corporate unravelling, and on that score Mazza largely relied on the ostrich defence, a strategy that went out the window in the wake of Enron.

The fact that he is not an accountant, nor a lawyer, nor an expert in structured finance and so forth was a note Mazza repeatedly struck throughout his testimony to explain away what happened, when and why. If he was present for decision making, the decision making was made by a team. Oftentimes, he testified, he wasn’t present at all.

It doesn’t hold water.

On that point: Mazza has the memory of a cheesecloth.

To hear Mazza tell it, all he ever wanted was to execute that “critical marriage of cockpit and cabin,” to source the “nexus of medicine and aviation,” to replace decrepit capital assets with fly-in-the-sky hospitals, to do his best for the residents of Ontario.

Doing his best meant drawing annual total compensation, including base salary and bonus, of $1.4 million. The size of the pay packet, and the quantum leap from his starting salary of $284,000, has been a lightning rod throughout the proceedings, which makes me wonder: is Eleanor Clitheroe following this?

There’s a point to the comparison: Clitheroe’s $2.2-million compensation package was set upon the advice of external compensation experts and tied to the promise, subsequently aborted, of going public with Hydro One.

Mazza skirted the compensation issue thusly: “The issue was for my board of directors to decide.”

Let’s think about that. Compensation should be set by a committee of the board that is composed of independent directors. As the CEO it is Mazza’s job to be the moral and ethical voice for transparency. Once Mazza was moved sideways to the dreadfully named ORNGE Peel, his salary was no longer subject to provincial salary disclosure. “I had nothing to do with it,” is his wan defence. The point: he had the power to say no.

ORNGE Peel was part of the futuristic ORNGE story promise.

The promise was made late in 2010 when a scheme was conceived — Mazza doesn’t like the word “scheme” — to create a spiderweb of for-profit special purpose entities that would benefit by being positioned under the government-underwritten ORNGE brand but which would not be beholden to the government in return.

“We were doing something that nobody else in the world was doing,” Mazza told the committee. “Nobody else was looking at transportation medicine they way we were and that was critical.”

Critical, yes. But global?

Mazza envisioned a joint venture with helicopter manufacturer AgustaWestland — makers of ORNGE choppers — to take ORNGE’s “volume of experience” abroad. By the fall of 2011 he says talks had commenced with “folks from India,” “folks from the UAE,” and “folks from Brazil.”

“My vision was we would be successful in generating revenues globally,” he said. He described the revenue potential as in the millions

He offered no breakdown of any concrete business plan, of anything to show the institutional investor support for such a scheme. You could just feel Bay Street shaking its collective head.

Sometimes, Mazza would throw his head in his hands. Once, he simply said he was exhausted. He put his heart and soul into this, he said. He was a believer.

It would take a shrink to unravel all that.

Delivered dailyThe Morning Headlines Newsletter

The Toronto Star and thestar.com, each property of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, One Yonge Street, 4th Floor, Toronto, ON, M5E 1E6. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please contact us or see our privacy policy for more information.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com